"Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies." - Animal Farm

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Projeculation

The Andrew Breitbart strain of Tea Party conservatism is a lesson in projection. Exhibit A: a man who willfully takes a black woman telling her story of triumphing over her own racism and manipulates it into a declaration of proud racism in order to "prove" how racist she--and the NAACP, and Barack Obama--is.

James O'Keefe, the young conservative activist who secretly recorded meetings with ACORN and was convicted in May of entering Sen. Mary Landrieu's office under false pretenses, allegedly tried to "punk" CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau by luring her on to a boat and seducing her....

...There's also a script O'Keefe was supposed to read on camera before meeting with Boudreau.

"I've decided to have a little fun," reads the script. "Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath."

If you squint really hard--and avoid the proliferation of porn star anchorwomen on FOX News, another instance of projection--you can kind of make out the vague, fuzzy point he's trying to get at: 'she thinks we're crazy! Well, we'll act crazy, and then show it was an act, proving CNN's confirmation bias!' It's a distant cousin behind the logic of the brilliant Sokal Hoax. Another case of conservative ressentiment, perhaps, but there's a point to be had.

Except that's not the point he's making at all.

The whole scheme of seducing a CNN anchorwoman is premised on her unprofessionalism. But for a journalist, as O'Keefe would style himself, seducing a subject in order to humiliate them is operating on a sub-Borat level of ethics.

That O'Keefe and his crew actually thought a woman would find decorating a room with porn and sexual paraphernalia (Viagra???) sexually enticing shows how seriously warped their own perspective is. Methinks they've spent too much time at The Forum.